Friday, April 22, 2022

Margaret Wander Bonanno memorial (Part 2.5)




From here.

Then, later on, a part 2.5 of the digital books I have.
Got just 4 of those.
These were the paper books, see.

So, here's those digital books.
These fit in the gap in her timeline between "Strangers From The Sky" and "Saturn's Child".


Star Trek: Music Of The Spheres (1990)


This is the real version of "Star Trek: Probe".
The one that's out there to buy on paper with her name on it? 
Not hers.
She was the first to say so.
"Music" is the sequel to "Voyage Home" and prequel to "Final Frontier".
Third in her "Dwellers In The Crucible" "Strangers From The Sky" trilogy with her original characters, Cliente (pronounced Clay-ohnt) and T'Shael.

Here again, is the behind the scenes story of how her original draft got mutilated  into "Probe" in her own words.

Super-short version, they didn't like it, they asked for her to rewrite it in an impossible deadline, so they got Gene DeWeese to rewrite it, and they gave him plenty of time to do it.
So, something about her chapped their ass, and they were trying to screw her over from the get.
I suspect plain old sexism.
There's head-shrinky theories you can get into of how else she could have gotten under their skin, but it still comes down to they wouldn't have treated her that way if she was a man.
Peter David can be a human shit-wagon and he had his ass powder-puffed at that company.
No, no other explanation holds up.
Pocket was being run by the "9 To 5" boss.
Plain and simple.

But, it all worked out, because her and DeWeese got to tell the story at a con, and at that same con, Margaret met and hooked up with Jack Donner who'd go on to be her partner for 20+ years.

Read her version, she tells it a million times better.

Anyhoo! On to the plot of the book!
Starfleet is trying to follow the "whale probe" (which actually turns out to be a manatee probe) back to its home planet.
Romulan military assholes get in the way, and fuck things up, but good-guy Romulan defectors help.
Shades of Russia vs Ukraine there.

The Romulan political and spy stuff ties in all the way back to the plot of "Dwellers".
This is really a "Dwellers" sequel as much as a Probe origin.

Now, you'd think the bean-counters would LIKE that! 
It sells more fucking books!
Nope, sexism and insecurity mattered more.

The nameless female Romulan Commander from "The Enterprise Incident" makes her cameo, and she mentions Tal.
That also ties the trilogy together.

Garamet Jen-Saunor (source of Margaret's board handle) from "Strangers" makes her cameo!!

Beethoven's 7th plays a major part in the plot resolution, and repeats throughout as foreshadowing.

And, as my friend Eric points out, Sulu acts like Spiccoli. 

Differences from "Probe"?
Well, I haven't read the whole book, and never plan to, but from what I can gather from spoiler synopsis, everything's just about the same, except Cleante and T'Shael are studiously carved out, and merged into one character called Dr. Audrea Benar.

So....her characters were forbidden, but DeWeese could make up a third character to take their place? 
Total bullshit. 
Insecure sexist morons.
I blame the suits, not DeWeese, he was just doing a job.

Oh, speaking of DeWeese, one time, one of the lame board trolls was accusing her of harming his reputation somehow, or having "bad blood" or some such nonsense, even though they were friends.
I made fun of the troll, and she dug it.

September 23, 2014

garamet said: ↑
Gene and I maintained an extensive correspondence after the fact. He was generous in sharing all of his written notes with me.

Diacanu said: ↑
No, you killed him.
You killed him with your bare hands.
Then you held his body over your head, howled at the moon, and tossed him from a bell tower to the horrified crowd below.
Then you made your escape with your evil lice infested bat wings.
You thought you'd gotten away with it, but Mr. Deweese's spirit screams out for vengeance.
You will be punished.
And the way you will be punished......is to be trolled on an obscure message board by a nobody!
Yeah! Yeah!
Take that!
YEEEAAAHHH!!

garamet said: ↑
^😂 He'd have loved that!

Now, I also find it interesting that she got in trouble for using her own characters, but Peter David got to make his own entire fucking crew with their own line of spinoff novels.
What bullshit.
Explosive splattering bullshit.
Sexist hypocrite pieces of shit.

"Probe" is ostensibly why she got invited to do "a Vulcan Primer" on the DVD for "Voyage Home".
She deftly talked about anything but.
Spicy! 🤣

She handed "Music" out for free if you e-mailed her at her website.
She's gone, her website's gone, but I have it.
If you want it, drop me a line.
Dunno if she'd be wanting me making that offer, but someone fuggin' has to.
What, I've gotta let it pass into oblivion? 
No. Not on my watch.


The Others (1990)
Otherwhere (1991)
Otherwise (1993)


Here's her own description of what they're about....

The premise was based on a single line from a TOS episode, “Return to Tomorrow.” Not to bore those who either (A) don’t know Trek and don’t care or (B) know it inside out and don’t need a recap, the crew of *Enterprise* encounter the remnants of a once-advanced civilization whose leader Sargon explains that millennia ago their species “seeded” other species on planets throughout the galaxy. Kirk is skeptical, but Spock replies that this would “tend…to explain certain elements of Vulcan prehistory.”

Now, I love Vulcans, so I thought: Why not start there? Suppose a ship piloted by Sargon’s species had engine trouble and had to ditch its cargo of Vulcan “sleepers” on a planet already inhabited by a more primitive species before the ship imploded? I could write about Vulcans without calling them Vulcans, and see where that took me.
Fast forward a thousand years. The twelve tribes of the original inhabitants (the People), when they’re not busy slaughtering their neighbors, have evolved to about a 15th century level of technology, advanced enough that some of them have been building ships capable of sailing the open sea. The Others, having been left on an archipelago far from the People’s lands, have abandoned war and developed a high-tech society. They’ve been quietly infiltrating People’s lands and observing, because they know that inevitably the two species will collide.
Or, as I described it in the original outline: What if, in his search for the New World, Columbus had stumbled onto a 21st century society? The impact on everything from economics to religion to medicine to…would be profound and, to some of the People, profoundly threatening. And we know what happens when the majority feels threatened.

I'll admit, I was skeptical, but fucking wow.
I personally rank these just behind "Ain't Exactly Clear" followed by the Preternaturals.
"Otherwise" is my favorite; it's the "Empire Strikes Back" of the trilogy.
It was also the one she was plugging on "The Chronic Rift".
Which is where I grabbed the top graphic of her from.

They'd make good Rankin/Bass fantasy movies.
Too bad that window is closed, what with the studio being defunct.
Man if I had a time machine...

Slight similarities to "The Dark Crystal". 
What with the Others getting decimated,  and the Gelflings getting genocided offscreen.
The resemblance only goes that far.
But it's there.

Dweneth was my favorite character of this trilogy, and I think the whole Bonanno-verse.
And that includes the characters that were me.

Two warrior girls in book 3 dubbed "The Thistles" reminded me an awful lot of Mihoshi & Kiyone from Tenchi Muyo.
Read these, watch Tenchi, and tell me I'm wrong.

Speaking of Tenchi, raunchy humor a plenty throughout.
There's sprinkles of her being naughty in the Trek stuff, but here she really goes for it.
She even predicted some of the fuckers in her villains.

Where these are essentially adult fantasy, it strikes me that Others beat Outlander, Thrones, and Witcher to the bookstands!
What some better marketing could have done...*sad sigh*

Oh! And she predicted e-mail and social media!
The Others have computers, and they can send text messages "via private channel" and "via public channel".
Well, public would be a board (or Facebook, or Twitter), and private would be E-Mail and PM.
Funny she'd go on to become such a board-junkie, it inspired "Ain't Exactly Clear".
She unwittingly predicted that too.

There's continuity Easter egg links in book 1 to "Music Of The Spheres" "Saturn's Child" and "Preternatural".
Lingri, our main narrator protagonist, and her grandmother/teacher speculate on intelligent life if it evolved in the water (the whale-probe aliens), life that evolved to breathe methane (the Fazians), and aliens that are all brain (the S.Oteri).
I wonder how far along in these other books she was, or if they were just germs of ideas that she fleshed out later.
Anyway, she plugged her whole multiverse together.
I'm addicted to doing that myself.
 
Whelp, maybe spoiled brat Peter David got a whole Starfleet crew of his own to play with from Pocket Books, but Margaret had a whole planet to play with.
She fuckin' wins.

IMHO, Ailuranth could have been as good as these, but it didn't get to blossom.
I could see the potential there.
At least there's these.

Speaking of comparisons, let's have my final tier-ranking of all of these.

Golden tier- Ain't Exactly Clear, Others Trilogy.
Second tier- Ailuranth, Unspoken Truth, Music Of The Spheres, Dwellers In The Crucible.

So, that's that completed.
My final thoughts in part 3 can't be improved on.
Go look at those.

Now, on to part 3, movies, shows, and other stuff!


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